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Wozniak Interview In Failure
Plastickiwi writes "The current issue of the online magazine Failure features an interview with Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak. Woz waxes humble about his role in founding the microcomputer revolution, claims there's no bad blood between himself and Steve Jobs, and weighs in on the Microsoft antitrust trial." Tons of interesting stuff: he also talks about Pirates of the Silicon Valley and other bits. As always, Woz is a joy to read.
These "I remember the good old days when we had to use spit and duct tape to make vacuum tubes" comments are a load.
Woz is/was a pioneer. He got there first, and he deserves a ton of credit for it, but no single man or woman could create a complete, modern PC system on their own. The market for PC technology has grown well beyond the hobbyist market, and with it has come competition to drive it much fasster and farther that it did 25 years ago.
I registered my hate for Jon Katz
wonder why they aren't taken seriously.
The report that the failuremag.com was running Microsoft software prompted several people to quickly comment that the server lag was Microsoft's fault. However, now that it turns out that the server is actually running Redhat 6.1, it's now not an OS problem, but rather a bandwidth problem. I don't disagree that it is INDEED a bandwidth problem, but the Linux community in GENERAL, has a nasty habit of blaming Microsoft for everything that goes wrong with the technology community, instead of first analyzing the problem. The community does not need an anti-hero to succeed. It needs clear-minded, OBJECTIVE, people who are driven to develop useful, user-friendly tools so that people can interact with their chosen CPU.
Moderate this post down if you want (Off-Topic, Flaim-bait, Troll), just take the time to really think about why your doing it. You can't look at the Open-source movement with rose colored glasses, or you'll miss all the important bits.
Riplakish
What makes his work exceptional is that there were no simulators available for modeling computer behavior; he and the other designers of the era had to SIMULATE THE ENTIRE COMPUTER IN THEIR HEADS. That is a very rare talent.
While there are many people today who can do digital designs, the available tools are much better than they were just 25 years ago. To find out how good Woz was you would have to use the same tools he had - with the same low level TTL chips, a 'hock your calculator' R & D budget to work with, and do your work in a garage.
Great work Steve, thanks.
Okay, great, you know who Tesla was. We are all happy for you. Now never bother us with his sad story again.
Steering back onto the topic, I would say that Woz has achieved all the wealth and fame that he actually wanted, and if he wanted more he would have had it. On his own terms, he is a total and complete success. That is why he is not a bazillionaire; he never wanted to be anything more or less than a really great engineer and inventor.
(This message brought to you by a fan of Thomas Edison, the Wizard on Menlo Park. Deal with it, pink boy!)
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I once emailed Woz, just commenting on the mural on the Apple building on Infinity Loop. The last thing I expected was a reply from him -- I just thought he might get a kick out of what I had to say. But wouldn't you know it -- that same evening, not more than a couple hours later, there was a reply from him. Not a generic "thanks for the email", but an actual thought-out email.
I felt at once grateful that he would care so much about the people that care about him, to take a few minutes out of his life to send along a reply and embarassed for having wasted at least five minutes of his time (which is certainly more valuable than my own).
I hope that people will not take advantage of this and bombard his email account just to get a personal reply. If you have something you really want to tell him, perhaps it would be kind to wait a couple or so weeks before sending it? I hate to imagine him up at 2am, glazed eyed in front of the Woz-Cam trying to fight off wrist-pains pounding out responses to all of his admirers!
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That was pivital in Woz dominating the PC field. Maybe it was the emotional drive, a little bit of his mental capacity, or re-evalution of what was important in life. He never really pushed as hard after that.
However the core Woz- the good guy, the visionary- still remains to inspire us.
Failure -- as your name, so your website.
Several naughty words were removed from this post, but no electrons were harmed.
AirSupply: go ahead, cut me off.
Woz is a very smart man, one who has designed many cool devices and one who has played a big roll in our past, but is he really that revelent today? Has he presented any new paradigms? Has he pushed new technology?
I think the above quote points out a major flaw in the thinking of many in our Geek community. There's a clear difference between what I call science and engineering ... and by this I do not mean the usual technical definitions. The mis-concept is that something is worth admiring only if it has pushed the frontier ... while in reality, there's a lot of value to activities that take what is at the frontier and make it more readily accessible to the common people.
The glory of Woz is not that he pushed the frontier of knowledge. Rather, he brought much of this knowledge and power to the masses. We often forget that there is a huge divide between what the few, select know and understand compared to the general public. For example, Edison was by no means a great scientist. His methods were crude and unorthodox, based on massive trial and error experiments (not what people today would call rational design). But his brilliance was that he was able to take solid scientific fundamentals and develop a tool (distributed electricity, light bulb) that could be appreciated and utilized by the society as a whole.
Similarly, Woz did not necessary develop the great paradigms or technologies (most of what was in the Apple ][ had already been developed) ... he brought it together in a package that could be exploited by others.
Does Woz get too much credit ... sure, he didn't single handedly build the PC. But should we still respect and hold some reverence for him? Absolutely. Not all of us can be the great frontier researchers, pushing the bounds of what we know and understand. But we can strive to do what Woz did ... which is take what we do know and distribute it better to the general public.
www.failure.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4 or Windows 98
:(
No wonder it's slashdotted
When will they ever learn?
Your Working Boy,
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The Mac clones are overrated. I own one, and I love it dearly. It's wicked-fast considering whet I got it. But, aside from the OS it runs, it feels like a PC. The inside is horribly designed and painful to fiddle with. The parts seem substandard. The CD-ROM drive does weird things. Also, Apple has followed through on Rhapsody. That's what MacOS X is. Unless you're referring to the idea of an Intel version.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
As cool as seeing a Woz interview is, I actually found the follow up interview to be more interesting. Need to go shopping around for this guy's book.
Anyhow I felt I just had to repeat this paragraph from that second interview here. This is singuarly the finest analysis of the whole MS monopoly issue I have seen to date.
Any thoughts about the Microsoft case?
I don't think the whole story was about Microsoft as a monopoly. The Justice department coming in had to do with power. Orrin Hatch let the cat out of the bag when he said, "Microsoft should have thought about working in Washington a lot sooner." Spend more money on campaigns, spend more money on lobbyists, get back here and schmooze us. Tug on your forelock and show respect. Look what happened after the Justice department announced its case. Microsoft gave away millions to campaigns, got a whole army of lobbyists back there, and Bill Gates went around from door to door to all the congressmen. That's why Intel did such a better job. Intel, the moment they announced the Justice department case, the whole executive team flew back there and said, "How can we settle this in an amicable way?" No one even remembers there was an antitrust case against Intel. They got out of that sucker in a week and a half. Microsoft was too arrogant. They said we don't need a federal government. They should have remembered Al Capone; he said the same thing. Federal judges and the United States Army, they'll get you. Gates' mistake was he didn't immediately apologize, settle, and say, "How can we make this thing better?" and by the way, we're donating a million dollars to the Democratic national committee and 2 million dollars to the Republican national committee. He's paying for being Bill Gates. Part of Gates' personality is to never, ever give up an inch of ground. But I think what they're scared of now is that they've now been categorized as evil. Everybody knew that in the industry anyway. Where it's going to hurt them is recruiting. The key to all these companies is what kind of talent they can recruit for the next generation of products. Do you really want to go work for the Evil Empire? People are embarrassed to say they work for Microsoft now. In the long run that's what kills you because the quality of your talent starts falling and you can't fix it. And so your products don't get out on time and they're not as good as they used to be. They should have just caved the first day. Big mistake.
RANT :ON:
Nobody, and I mean not a single soul, in congress gives a squat about whether or not Microsoft bruised other companies around them. Fact is, they didn't pay their "protection" money like Intel, IBM, Netscape, Sun, Apple, Oracle, and the rest of the industry testifying against Microsoft has done. MS has not been fighting a battle to innovate, but rather to not have to pay the "protection" money.
When all this plays out, no court ruling is going to replace the desktop OS's of the world. Only a better product will do that.
- High ease of use
- Low consumer cost
- Heavy support by developers
At this point, Linux is perhaps the best bet for actually going after the MS market share. The point is, nobody in the open source world should be looking to this monkey trial as any kind of victory no matter how it plays out. Instead, it should be waking folks up to the cold hard fact of the payola system that's really on trial here.RANT :OFF:
The rest of the interview was definitely worth a read as well.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Indeed! I had to shake my head when I saw this:
"I wrote 'Microsoft's a monopolist' and the [New York] Times wanted to edit it to say, 'Microsoft is innovative.'"
I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. "All the news that's fit to print... except if it challenges the status quo." Not the first time, either.
Bah.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
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Personally, I'd develop a foundation to boost the space program - get private and public partners together and start working on some big jobs, like manned expeditions to Mars and so on.
Of course, that's after I buy an NHL team and move them to Indianapolis.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
That's because the PPC clone companies, with the exception of Power, had no R&D budget... at all.
Some of them, like Motorolla, also spent $0 marketing their product. Why bother when a review in Macworld will get you plenty of sales?
Finally, most of them used cheaper hardware than Apple traditionally went with. They were basically selling performas in PC cases.
None of the clone vendors did anything to expand the Macintosh market, contrary to the predictions of those who had been calling for it. All they did was put out a "me too" product for less money and steal customers away from Apple, which would be great except none of them could possibly survive without Apple's ongoing OS development, and none of them wanted to share the cost of that work. (They continually balked at Apple's licensing costs, and were bitching and moaning about that price right up to the day that Jobs pulled the plug.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
It sounds to me like he's one of the few people more interested in his own interests than the typical capitalist nirvana (more money at the expense of everything).
Why isn't he as big and bad and rich as Bill Gates? Probably because he *really* doesn't care. Some of the posts expressed concern that its not fair or its unfortunate that he hasn't been as financially sucessful as some of the other pioneers - I doubt he wants or needs our pity. He surely has enough money to continue doing the things he wants, and thats really all a person needs when it comes down to it.
One of the horrible side effects of capitalism is that it becomes very easy for people to lose site of (or never even discover) what actually interests them and brings a smile to their face. Its not too surprising if you think about it:
The core of capitalism is the open market. Anyone can compete. So, whats always in everyones faces? Advertising. "Buy our products. YOU WANT OUR PRODUCTS. YOU ARE NOT COMPLETE WITHOUT OUR PRODUCTS." Look no farther than the advertising strategy of the more successful companies - its a brainwash. People are tricked into thinking that having things equates with being successful and happy (aka materialism). Being rich becomes the ultimate goal. Often in rich communities thats exactly the mentality children are raised on (followed by fraternities, sororities, and businesses). Its quite unfortunate - especially now that the execs at MTV have figured out how brainwash all the teenagers. Anyone else notice that MTV is 1 never-ending commercial now? Anyone else feel like we're in a downward spiral?
So if Woz has this anti-M$ article lying about, that NYT won't publish, why not publish it somewhere else. Such as here on Slashdot. I know *I* would read it!
If you just joined us without reading the full article, Woz describes how NYT asked him to write an article about the M$ case, but woudn't run it after he was too critical of M$, and he thinks it's beacause of the close ties between M$ and NYT
And unlike Edison, he wasn't so full of himself so as to think DC was good for long distance electricity transfer.
Back on-topic myself, the damned server is dead as the proverbial doornail.
Insanity is the last line of defence for the master diplomat. But you have to lay the groundwork early.
Airplane accident.
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Failure Magazine is not only being Slashdotted right now, but NPR's all things considered just did a piece on the online 'zine as well. It can be found Here.
Edison ripped off many of his ideas from the people who worked for or with him, including AC from Tesla, who died penniless because he did not believe in restricting the application of his ideas.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It would really be cool to meet him one day, just to have a conversation and thank him.
Send him an email at Woz.org. He answers all received emails.
www.failuremag.com is running Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) PHP/4.0.0 mod_ssl/2.6.2 OpenSSL/0.9.5a on Linux
Sorry about that.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Woz is a teacher now. If you can think of something more admirable than a teacher, I'd like to hear it.
NPR did a segment on this magazine yesterday. It sounds wicked-smart.
Sort of like suck in that it busts a hole in the whole dot-com thing.
I recommend it.
-carl
. We've got computers, we're tapping phone lines, you know that ain't allowed - Talking Heads, "Life During Wartime"
Well, I guess "Failure" magazine is aptly named. Goodbye server. I'll just have to stay here with the other slowpokes and make humorous/offtopic remarks.
"...claims there's no bad blood between himself and Steve Jobs..."
Probably because neither of them uses blood. Woz is clearly an advanced AI left here by aliens while Jobs probably upgraded from blood to a secret liquid compound that speeds his "boot time" in the morning from 10 minutes to an insanely great 5 seconds.
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there's a documentary-like feature done by PBS called "Triumph of the Nerds" and my dad being the Director of Engineering at an affiliate of PBS, I had him get me a copy. They cover Woz pretty well. By this I mean, they show his technical genius and accomplishments as well as his humility. I can't help but get the impression from *everything* I read, hear or see about Woz that he's a genuinely good human being and really one of the greatest hackers ever. It's always nice to hear about him in the news from time to time.
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It's interesting how he keeps claiming that there's no bad blood between him and Jobs - why isn't he working at Apple now, or at least on the board of directors? Does he even hold any apple stoc, for that matter?
Don't abuse your ignorance by BSing about it.
Einstein did a *lot* besides the theory of relativity. (Hint, what did he win his Nobel for?) Furthermore his contributions continued for a very long time. For instance he was hardly a youngster when he and some friends came up with the EPR paradox!
Regards,
Ben
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
Can it really be true that if you are someone as rich and powerful as Microsoft, that you can buy favorable Op-Ed pieces ???
Woz seems to think so.
it is not down it's just really working to hard :)
telnet www.failuremag.com returns redhat 6.1 so I would say reports of m$ are overrated
Tackle
I do think we give him too much credit. Sure, we all see the humble genius developer/hacker in him and (at least I do) strive to even maybe find that in ourselves, but come on.
Woz is a very smart man, one who has designed many cool devices and one who has played a big roll in our past, but is he really that revelent today? Has he presented any new paradigms? Has he pushed new technology?
Many people have contributed greatly to the advancement of computers, and they deserve to be written about in the history books. But Woz was a man, and we give him more credit than he deserves by glorifying him as we do.
Personally, if I did some really cool stuff back in the day, I'd love for people to still be talking about it 20 years later but I would be nervous if I was built into the ultimate computer man, and I think that shows a lot in his writing.
http://kered.org
Success is only for the elite!
Just like Universities won't let you just take the final exam for a course [even if you do pay in full for the course!] and skip all the classes. They won't give you credit because it's not about what you know, but showing that you can navigate through channels and bureaucracy and kiss all the right butts.
Then again some guy wrote a simple app (mosaic) and "revolutionized the computer industry". So I guess it can still be done.
he's quite wealthy. back in 1996 (i *think*) he was estimated at $200 million. he has just traditionally always kept out of the spotlight, and so you never hear about it. anyway, he lives comfortably, and with his spare time and money teaches music and computers to children.
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I had never read any of "The Woz"'s writing before, and it is nice that he does not have the "look at me, I am wonderful" problems of Steve Jobs. To listen to SJ, one would think that he--with some technical assistance from SW--created the microcomputer. SW is a lot more accurate.
Also nice was the mention of Mike Markkula, but like most stories of the founding of Apple no mention is made of the role of Nolan Bushnell.
I was very, very pleased to see mention of Atari engineeer Al Acorn in the article, however. If you know the full story on Atari--which SW does not cover--the complicated reasons for Bushnell's decision were what eventually brought the fall of Atari. Bad management from a ex-Burlington manager ran Atari into the ground, and a ex-Pepsi manager came inches from killing Apple. When will the technology industry realize that you can't have hi-tech industries run by people who don't understand them?
Woz has his head on a lot straighter than most of the people in SV.
wish
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